((J. Dac says: Hey, thanks for reading, all. I apologize in advance if things are rocky, the plot jumps around, or if there are severe inconsistencies in voice/facts. There've been BIG breaks in real-time between when I've written certain parts, and I never proofread fan fiction because I'm lazy.

Also, I originally intended this for publication in the Neopian Times, which is why nobody swears (and thus many people sound ridiculous and unnatural, especially thug-types), Frank doesn't smoke and violence is extremely veiled for the first few chapters. After consulting with a few friendly bearers of bad news at the Neopian Times Writer's Forum, I realized it was STILL unpublishable because of some petty, ridiculous rules. (How I yearn for the days of Mr. Shankly.) So now I'm just writing it however I please, and might gut it later to try to get it published. (Although that's never worked before, a thing I learned with "Neopian Beauty" AND "Frank," which I virtually raped while editing for content and still got rejected for something dumb. Or maybe my writing's honestly that bad? Inferiority complex, hollah.) Bah, I'm sorry, this sounds like the foreward to an enraged manifesto against the NT, and I guess in some ways it is. Of course, it's sort of my fault for writing mature material for a children's fandom.

Anyway, I appreciate your comments, really, because of all of the trouble and grief I've had with the NT and censorship, and I'm having a shit time lately in real life, with writing and other things. Alright, 'nuff of my fussing. I solemnly swear I'll keep the soapboxing to a minimum for future.))

Surgery starts with a rush of water with hands thrust beneath—a cleansing, not unlike a religious rite. And with those hands sterilized, one makes the awkward voyage from sanitation to surgical theatre, handling the door with feet acrobatics. Inside, the patient awaits like the newly dead, laid out on stainless steel. The anesthetic tube trailing down their windpipe tugs at their lower lips and gives their faces a ridiculous quality, and this almost interrupts the seriousness of the process until I see the tools. Laid out like weaponry on a sheet of powder blue, their fierce twinkling never fails to catch my eye—tremble my heart. They are the single-toothed keys that allow me entrance past the soft wall of flesh. So silently, they bite past that barrier with the tenderness of a kiss, drawing out a sweet red line of passion. And inside: ugliness. The organs, not meant to be seen by human eyes, the color of bruises and meat, pulsate in their own slick wretchedness.

The only organ I've ever had respect for in spite of its vulgarity—not including the brain—was the heart. Perhaps it's the self-sustaining nature of the heart that earns my admiration, a muscle so resilient and obsessed with its task that, placed within a glass of proper chemicals, will continue its endless beating. Perhaps it's due to the body's function hinging on the blood: stop the sucker, and the whole system unravels. And perhaps it's because of that ancient association of the heart with feeling and emotion, and how hard it is to reconcile that red-purple pump with such sappy sentiment.

For the most part, though, I attribute it to the difficulty operating on the heart presents. One has to pay the entrance fee of breaking back the ribcage—sometimes an even steeper price in other species. Yet the heart (strangely, unlike the conventional brain) seems to be a constant among sentient species. I appreciate its familiarity. When you've lost your home, you learn to appreciate anything familiar, even in the details.

Surgical-medical—I was somewhat of a holy mixture of talent within the Feather community, able to diagnose and treat chemically just as well as I could cut and rearrange. Upon arriving in an intergalactic community, however, my talent was somewhat diminished. While that giant meeting place of species across the galaxy, nay, the universe came like a miracle on my radar screen, its entrance into my life foretold overwhelming difficulties. After all, I was a surgeon-doctor for a now all-but-extinct species. Anatomy of aliens would be a whole new frontier to forge. Not to mention the language barrier.

Luckily, I managed to dock my puttering escape pod in a public port, despite being unfamiliar with the formalities of space parking. Luckily, as well, the toll keeper didn't have a stick crammed up his bum, and acknowledged my craft as an exotic specimen of an undiscovered species, and thus temporarily exempt from the fees typically charged for docking. Luckily (though this fortune wasn't apparent at first), my docking was more like a crash-landing, and my escape pod plowed right into the craft of one Gormos Kamen Kougra, a first-class mechanic.

After Gormos finished bemoaning the destruction of his just-retuned craft in a language I couldn't understand and I finished apologizing in a language Gormos couldn't understand, I was taken away by the Intergalactic Police to be registered as a citizen of the intergalactic community, as well as have my species and home planet logged and recorded. Taking a tip from Faeries, I lied. My home planet was listed as "destroyed" and I was registered by the bored secretary as SLOTH, FRANK – M.D. – SOLE SURVIVOR OF FEATHER RACE AND PLANET.

By the authorities, I was given:

1) a handful of intergalactic currency;

2) a week's worth of lodging at a hotel within the space station;

3) a copy of The Beginner's Guide to Intergalactic Common Tongue;

4) a torn out copy of the current day's Classifieds from "The Universe Times";

5) a cup of coffee that was more grinds than liquid

6) a rough pat on the bum to get out of their office and quit wasting their time.

Overwhelmed, I at first regretted my decision to abandon my last two comrades, preferring instead annihilation by Faerie beam. Thankfully, an unlikely Samaritan came to my rescue. Gormos had been waiting for me back at my busted escape pod, and through a series of elaborate hand gestures and somewhat disturbing body movements, he offered to assist me in adjusting to intergalactic living.

Without Gormos' help, I doubt I would've successfully navigated these new intergalactic waters successfully. After my tenure at the hotel ran out, Gormos offered me a cot in his cramped quarters.

From what I gathered from following him to work regularly (Gormos introducing me, presumably, as an 'assistant'), the muscled Kougra worked as a repairman and maintenance man to large transport ships that hauled prisoners across long expanses of space to the local maximum-security Intergalactic Penitentiary. (Apparently, someone went stir-crazy with the word 'intergalactic' when naming everything in the space station.) The close proximity of such an important prison meant there was a great deal of police influence throughout the space station. Simultaneously, it almost meant there was a great deal of rebels, whether miraculously escaped from their impoundment, or seeking to spring a buddy behind bars, or those communicating and doing business with those in the former groups.

The space station itself was enormous. I remember approaching it with my jaw slack, unable to believe its size. Built by Aishas (a species thought to be the oldest and most advanced in the galaxy—and, because everyone was an alien and the two-eared variety hadn't emerged yet, didn't require a prefix), the craft had a 3-D elliptical shape, its short ends used to anchor the ship in space while the broad sides were used as docking area. Four 'ear' towers sprung out of the top of the craft. One was used to various technological experiments, and deep space communication, while another was used as an apartment complex for the very wealthy, culminating in an extravagant penthouse in the very ear. The other two were used for various businesses, not unlike the purpose of Feather skyscrapers. The bulk of the interior ship was used for storage and government purposes. Just around the perimeter of these services, inside the ship, was a long, gray hallway of tiny apartments, all shaped with the same cube-like dimensions that just barely accommodated a bed, dresser, and a few personal items. A common bathroom was shared among every twenty rooms, which often meant upwards of forty people making a mad scramble in the morning to claim the five shower stalls. Gormos and I lived here.

While my fortuitous friendship with Gormos eased my transition greatly, the obstacles I faced were still formidable. I struggled with learning the language. Gormos, illiterate, couldn't help me with learning to read the indecipherable characters. He did, however, help me enroll in a literacy course, one he had attempted to complete on multiple occasions but always eventually felt "it wasn't worth it." (I translated this to "I really suck at learning.") In the mean time, I earned my share of the rent as a hired assistant to Gormos. Though this job was little more than watching Gormos' feet tap in time to the music on his stereo while he fiddled with the underbelly of space ships, I did learn a good deal about tools from handing them to him.

When I finally obtained a basic grasp on the language (one year for comprehension, five years for fluency), I began hunting down text books of anatomy and modern medicine in one of the bookstores contained in the space station's third earstalk. Though the alien at the counter gave me some nasty glares, I bunkered down for weeks in the mustiest corner of that shop, poring over a particular medical tome I found. It detailed the anatomy of more than a hundred different species, and from what I could make of its publication date, was fairly recent. Not only did it outline and explain the function of all basic organ systems, but it also listed common ailments in common species, and the traditional treatment for these ills.

My personal research into this new body of knowledge spanned a few decades. Fortunately, Feathers were not a short-lived species, and I was still considered fairly young on a Feather lifeline by the time I had acquired a sufficient body of knowledge to practice (while also frantically leafing through the newest medical journals to keep up with current breakthroughs). Gormos, too, retained his youth, still the burly Kougra I had first met, without a single streak of gray running through his fur.

I had switched jobs almost endlessly before I was ready to take my first dip into intergalactic medicine. I resigned from my first position after dropping a tool on Gormos' hind paw for the umpteenth time. Gormos, while nursing his throbbing paw, had calmly suggested through clenched fangs that I might consider a job that didn't require heavy lifting … or, any lifting. Embarrassed, I agreed.

The thriving black market scene seemed the most profitable to me. While I didn't have a ship or even a pilot to do cross-galaxy smuggling, and I didn't have the resources or networks to start an exchange ring of my own, I did have the limited-but-expanding talents of a rudimentary doctor. A great deal of space station citizens had no medical insurance to cover expensive procedures or medicines, or were so flat-out broke from paying expensive space station rent that they couldn't afford any procedure rates upfront. (There were also the select few who were just plain cheap.) Black market medicine was a flourishing trade, many 'freelance' doctors with makeshift pharmacies in their own squat apartments.

With Gormos and my budget already stretched nearly to its breaking point, I had to resort to alternative methods of obtaining medical supplies. I sought out a job as a nurse's assistant at the space station's hospital, and began a regiment of pocketing medical supplies. I started with tongue depressors and q-tips, progressed to latex gloves and hypodermic needles, and soon I was stealing bottles of medicine by the handful out of examination rooms. Sure, the patients were blamed, but I benefited from this as well. On their irate way out of the hospital, I very politely approached them about my 'independent practice' and gave them my card. With distrust already generated towards institutionalized medicine, most of these wronged patients were willing to give my practice a go.

Obtaining larger and more specialized equipment required a bit more finesse than the office-supplies thievery I was committing. Decked out in black scrubs, latex gloves and a ski mask (why anybody had use of a ski mask in a space station was beyond me), I snuck into the labs late at night, armed with Gormos' tool belt. Finding the proper bolt-and-tool combination took a bit of trial-and-error, but with the watchman dozing on a heavy dose of sedatives (sprinkled masterfully into his coffee while he was gabbing on the phone), I had plenty of time for such experimentation.

The lab only noticed its dwindling equipment when the defibrillator went missing. By then, I had a strong enough practice to very smoothly quit my job at the hospital. Of course, Gormos complained a bit about the size of the defibrillator, but when he found out how amusing it was to wake me up at night by applying the paddles with a low charge to my back, his complaints gradually diminished.

While the black market business was certainly lucrative, it became tiresome to meet in discreet locations, and the lease I had taken out on a second room for a pharmacy and surgical theatre began to weigh on my sporadic income. Once I felt I had a professional understanding of alien medicine and surgery, I submitted my resumé to various small—and legal—medical practices scattered throughout the hospital.

Again, my connection to Gormos saved my behind. I hadn't considered that my lack of any certified medical degree technically disqualified me from ever legitimately practicing medicine. Therefore, from the small practices I received no reply.

However, I did receive one phone call—from the Intergalactic Penitentiary. They needed a new medical examiner for annual checkups and health care of the prisoners. While on the phone, I looked over to Gormos, who gave me a toothy grin and a silent, double thumbs-up. I was in.

And that is the brief story of how I established myself as a citizen of the Alien Aisha intergalactic space station, and how I attained the miserable position of Chief of Medicine (and really, the only medical consult) at the Intergalactic Penitentiary. This story was just the prelude to a grander symphony—a grandiose composition of agony and woe. It was in this job—nearly a decade into it—that I found my destiny: shackled, snarling, and dressed in a neon orange jumpsuit.

That would be Hoshiya.